phil ringnalda

Practically anyone with a cat is familiar with kitty-typing: you’re typing along, intending to say Hey babe, what's ur sign? Wanna cyber? when a cat decides you should stop petting that plastic thing and pet something that appreciates it, and hops aboard, and you type together: Hey babe, what's ur lkjwe3? Wanna rol katnip? That’s fine: fur people have their own priorities, and no interest in ours. But…

Last night, I hibernated my laptop, but left the lid up. When I got up, Charlie was sitting on the keyboard, looking only a little perplexed. She’d apparently hit the power button with no problem, then had trouble reading the menus, so she turned on Microsoft Narrator to read them to her. She wanted to do something on the intarweb, since she started to create a new connection, but only got as far as naming it something like QLE[zw (I forget the name, but I know it had a mix of upper- and lower-case, and a square bracket, so she must have confused password security with connection name security) when she must have realized that Thunderbird and Firefox were both still running, and had connected for her. Then she opened two Internet Explorer windows, and Outlook Express, and did who knows what. One thing she did that I don’t know how to do was lock the keyboard, so when I got to it, keypresses just beeped and didn’t do anything. Rather than mess with it, I just rebooted, got my keyboard back, and started Thunderbird.

Oh, that’s a bad, bad kitty.

Thunderbird asked if I wanted to make it the default email client. She can use Outlook Express if she thinks she must, but set it as default? That’s it, she’s banned from the computer now.